Intuition and Early Warning Sign Activities

Intuition is the funny body feelings (early warning signs) that we all get at different times. Sometimes intuition is nothing more than our fears taking over our body and thoughts but often intuition is our body screaming at us to listen to what is really happening around us.

Intuition needs to be clearly taught to our children. Far too often, I have heard children and women say, after the fact, “If only I’d listened to my intuition.”

Here’s two simple art activities I use with children in therapy to help them understand what their early warning signs are. Recognizing and acting on early warning signs is a way to prevent our children from being sexually abused. These therapeutic activities can be easily blended into your every day play with your children. Protective Play is the most unobtrusive way to keep our kids safe.

Drawing/writing exercise using prompt pictures: Show your child a picture from a magazine, photo, or card. Ask them to draw/write the way their body would react to the situation in the picture. When, and if, children respond by saying they would punch/kiss the person, trust them because they look nice or run away, ask them to draw/write what would be happening inside their body where nobody else can see. This process is a bit like peeling an onion. There are layers to get through to help connect with body reactions, emotional layers that are deeper than the behaviours children show us.

Art collage of different faces: Cut faces out of magazines and glue to a sheet of paper. Ask the child to say how they think each person is feeling. Learning emotional language will help your child throughout life. When they can express emotions, children have a better chance of telling you if something happens to them. Because children don’t have an extended emotional vocabulary they act out their emotions as a way of telling us something is wrong. As parents, we often miss these messages, and ask the child to stop being naughty/silly/annoying. If your child cannot find words to express their emotions, they have body stances. Mix the pieces up and have the child match them together. While the child is matching, give hints about what a person’s legs might look like if they’ve got an angry face and have their arms crossed, or what a face might look like when the arms and legs are hanging limp.

Can you imagine yourself doing this with your kids? What other things do you do to teach intuition (early warning signs) to your kids?

My favorite book for teaching about Intuition is: Jelly Legs by Colin Varney.

Other activities to protectively play around intuition and early warning signs:

A Mime of Early Warning Information
Game to Develop Emotional Intelligence.
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Game to Develop Emotional Intelligence.

In a Mime of Early Warning Information, I looked at developing emotional language and intelligence to help children uncover their feelings. I provided two game activities to use to get kids playing and talking about their early warning signs. Here’s another two ideas.

Scary stories or movies: Scary stories are a great way to introduce physical early warning signs. When reading a story together you can ask your child how their body is feeling. If they respond that they don’t know, reflect to them what their body is doing: curled up in a ball, fists clenched, sweating, chewing fingernails, etc.

Common physical descriptions from children: In my work with children I have heard many early warning signs. These include:

A pack of wolves in my tummy.
A ball of string with lots of knots in it.
Fire or skull and crossbones in my stomach.
A question sign/bell in my head.
Beautiful smelling flowers in my heart.
Ants biting me all over.
Legs like Mummy’s tummy, all wobbly.
An echidna in my chest.

Use some of these or invent your own when you discuss feelings with your child. By modeling a verbal description of how your body is feeling linked to the emotional word you would use, you are assisting your child to gain a greater feeling vocabulary. Use a variety of physical descriptions to match a whole range of emotions, not just scared or angry feelings. Remember the good feelings too. How would you describe the body feelings for happiness, relief and excitement? Describing feelings is not just about the painful feelings. All feelings are natural and are there to tell us something.

A Mime of Early Warning Information.

Intuition is the grown up, fancy name for feelings in our body and heart. Our intuition is what starts our Early Warning Signs: physical sensations in our body that tell us that not all is okay. To protect ourselves from getting hurt, it is important that we listen to our early warning signs and remove ourselves from risky situations when they arise.

There are over 2000 feelings words in our vocabulary but typically, any of us will only use six words to describe our feelings. To give kids the best possible chance or recognizing and responding to sexually exploitive situations it is very important to teach them about feelings.

Here is a really easy activity to play with your children to help them develop new feeling words to attach to their body feelings – their early warning signs.

Mime: When the opportunity arises and the kids are bored with nothing to do, play a miming game. Silently act out a particular body reaction to any emotion and ask the children to guess what you are feeling. Offer a prize for correct answers. Gingerbread people make great food prizes because you can then naturally mention body ownership.

Remember though that food is a child’s right and food rewards do not replace good care and nutrition. A food reward needs to be something special: A real treat, not something that your child has a basic right to on a daily basis.

For more free game and activity ideas to do with Intuition and Early Warning signs have a look at BITSS of Intuition.

Let me know about how your Mime of Early Warning information went.